The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1887-12-12

worth fifteen thousand dollars The gov
ernment of the United States took or the
tax from personal income, among other
reasons because so few people would tell the
| truth, and many man with an income or
hundreds of dollars day made statements
which seemed to imply he was about to be
handed over to the overseer of the poor
Careful 70 pay their passage from Liverpool
to New York, yet smuggling in their Sara
toga trunk ten silk dresses from Paris and
half dozen watches from Geneva, Swltzer-
land, telling the custom house officer on the
wharf, ''There is nothing in that trnnk but
wearing apparel" and putting five dollar
gold piece in his hand to punctuate the
statement
Described in the text are all those who
are particular never to break the law of
grammar, ard who want ali their language
an elegant specimen of syntax, stralnlng
out all the inaccuracies of speech with
fine sieve of literary criticism, while through
their conversation 60 slander and innuendo,
and profanity and falsehood larger than
whole caravan of camels when they might
better fracture every law of the language
and shock intellectual taste, and better let
every verb seek in vain for its nominative,
and every noun for its government, and
every proposition lose its way in the sen
tence, and adjectives and participles, and
pronouns get into a grand riot worthy OF
the Fourth ward on election day than to
commit moral inaccuracy. Better swal-
low thousand gnats than one camel
Such persons are also described in the
text, who are very much alarmed about the
small faults Of others, and have no alarm
about their own great transgresslons. There
are in every community and in every
church, watch dogs who feel called upon to
keep their eyes on others and growl. They
are full of suspicious. They wonder II that
man is dishonest, if that man is not unclean,
if there is not something wrong about the
other man. They are always the first
to hear of anything wrong.
Vultures are always the first to
smell carrion. They are self-appointed de-
tectives. lay this down as rule without
any exception, that those people who have
the most faults themselves are most merciless
in their watching of others. From scalp of
head to sole of foot they are full of jeal-
ousies and hypercriticisms They spend
their life in hunting for muskrats and mud
turtles instead Of hunting for Rocky noun
tain eagles, always for something mean in
stead of something grand. They look at
their neighbors' imperfections through
microscope, and look at their own imperfec-
tions through a telescope upside down.
Twenty faults of their own do not hurt
them so much as one fault of somebody
else. Their neighbors imperfections are
own imperfections are like camels and they
swallow them.
But lest some might think they escape the
scrutiny of the text, have to tell you that
we all come under the divine satire when we
make the questions of time more prominent
than the questions of eternity. Come now,
let us go into the confessional. Are not all
tempted to make the question, Where shall
| live now9 greater than the question,
Where shall live foreverl How shall
get more dollars herel greater than the ques-
tion, How shall / lay up treasures in heav-
On? tae question, How shall / pay my
debts to mani greater than the question,
How shall meet my obligations to Gods
the questi on, How shall gain the world,
greater than the question, What If ! lose
my soull the question, Why did God let sin
tion How shall / get it extirpated
from my naturel the question,
What shall do with the twenty, or forty,
or seventy years of my sublunar existenceg
greater than the question, What shall do
with the millions Of cycles of my POSTER
restrial existencel Time, how small it isl
Eternity, how vast it is The former more
insignificant in comparison with the latter
than gnat is insignificant when compared
with a camel. We lodged the text. We
said, "That doesn't mean me, and that
doesn't mean me-" and with a ruinous
benevolence we are giving the whole sermon
away.
But let us all surrender to the charge.
What an ado about things here. What
poor preparation for a great eternity. AS
though a minnow were larger than behe-
moth. as though a swallow took wider Cir
cult than an albatross, as though a nettle
were taller than a Lebanon cedar, as
though gnat were greater than camel, as
though minute were longer than century,
as though time were higher, deeper. broader
than eternity. So the text which flashed
with lightning of wit as Christ uttered it,
is followed by the crashing thunders of
awful catastrophe to those who make the
qnestions of time greater than the ques-
tions of the future, the oncoming, over
shadowing future. o eternityl eternity
eternityi